Posts in Category: HealthView

​U.S. hospitals highly value enhanced cardiovascular registries data collection as they look for ways to improve patient care, workflow and reporting requirements. To that end, LUMEDX and DASpecialists have announced a partnership to create solutions for cardiovascular data management for hospitals.

The move brings together DASpecialists' expertise and experienced clinical nurse analysts for both the ACC NCDR® and STS data registries with LUMEDX's unique suite of cardiology data analytics, integration and registry tools.

"LUMEDX's cardiovascular registry and clinical workflow solutions help hospitals meet reporting requirements while improving efficiency and supporting quality of care. DASpecialists' services are a perfect complement to LUMEDX's offerings," said Gwendelyn Korney, VP of Corporate Accounts at LUMEDX. "In fact, DASpecialists are providing data abstraction services for several of our customers currently, and these hospitals are very pleased. We believe that this new partnership will enable us to deliver even greater value to our customers."

For more information on LUMEDX HealthView solutions, please email us at info@lumedx.com. For more information on DASpecialists, please visit www.daspecialists.com or email support@daspecialists.com.

​MIPS, the Medicare physician reimbursement program set to begin in 2019, is causing healthcare providers to consider the use of registries, if they haven't already, as part of their workflow practices.

This Merit-Based Incentive Payment System, part of the Quality Payment Program (QPP) created under the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 (MACRA), directs clinicians to meaningfully use certified electronic health record (EHR) technology, according to the American College of Cardiology.

One effect of the regulations is the promotion of the use of registries to help clinicians manage the reporting of the EHRs. MIPS allocates five bonus points in its scoring mechanism to clinicians who are using registries. "An eligible clinician can earn bonus points by completing additional measures under the Public Health and Clinical Data Registry Reporting objective, such as reporting to a specialized registry (i.e., the PINNACLE Registry) or using certified EHR technology to complete certain activities in the Improvement Activities category, such as managing referrals and consultations," the American College of Cardiology reports.

It makes good sense to incentivize use of registries, says Raymond R. Russell, III, MD., Ph.D., because they can help physicians and their teams face a challenge to develop systems that help fulfill reporting requirements with minimal burden. "For many cardiologists, an effective, efficient approach to reporting quality measures data is to take advantage of the registries at our disposal," he writes in Cardiovascular Business.

Qualified Clinical Data Registries (QCDRs), allow clinicians to report on specialty-developed measures that are robust and uniquely geared to their area of practice, thus fulfilling CMS reporting requirements while closely tracking the quality of their practices.

"As the cardiovascular community moves forward with the new value-based models for performance evaluation and reimbursement, it will be essential to develop effective tools that support efficient completion of requirements," Russell suggests. "Some tools, such as registries, are proven and available to us now."

LUMEDX, as the leading independent provider of ACC and STS registry software, believes registries are the cornerstone ao cardiovascular data intelligence and the foundation of a true CVIS (Cardiovascular Information Systems). For more information, visit our Registries page: http://www.lumedx.com/registries.aspx.

The 28th Annual Scientific Sessions of the American Society of Echocardiography, the premier event for bringing together echo experts from around the world to share learning and networking opportunities, will take place June 2-6 in Baltimore, Md.

This year, the Scientific Sessions will highlight the cycle of introducing new advances into clinical medicine: investigation-innovation-incorporation. These three themes are integrated throughout the program and cover a broad range of topics related to cardiovascular ultrasound.

LUMEDX will be at ASE in force, manning Booth 617 at the Baltimore Convention center. Please drop by to see our latest workflow and data intelligence solutions.

​Although much progress has been achieved in digitizing the healthcare system, today's health IT infrastructure still struggles to support a transition to "value-based care," according to a new report from the American Medical Informatics Association.

"Provider organizations pursuing new models of health care delivery and payment are finding that their electronic systems lack the capabilities needed to succeed," the study asserted. "The result is a chasm between the current health IT ecosystem and the health IT ecosystem that is desperately needed."

The report, titled, "Crossing the health IT chasm: considerations and policy recommendations to overcome current challenges and enable value-based care," outlines policy recommendations for patients, providers and researchers to improve access to healthcare data for all the groups and proposes new standards for IT systems and applications.

LUMEDX, the leader in cardiovascular data intelligence and a pioneer in cloud-powered healthcare solutions, offers a comprehensive suite of software and services enables meaningful analytics, high-performance workflows, optimal integration of clinical and HIS data, and improved continuity of care.

For more information on LUMEDX HealthView solutions, please visit www.lumedx.com or email info@lumedx.com.​

It's becoming increasingly clear that healthcare providers are reaping big dividends from hosting data and services in the cloud.

"Hosting applications in the cloud can help you scale as you grow, collaborate with partners and patients, store and manage huge amounts of patient data and get a bigger return on your IT investments in the long run," Molly True wrote last week in HealthCare Business & Technology

She cited the ability for hospitals to combine a public cloud offering with a private cloud offering where the systems are connected and interoperate with other existing systems. Providers can also keep some of their most sensitive data on their premises and some of their applications.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is following this trend. Last week, it announced plans to increase the adoption rate of cloud services this year from 18.5 percent to 30 percent of its systems.

"We have worked to embrace cloud," HHS Chief Information Officer Beth Killoran said. "If you do cloud properly, the implementation should be transparent to the workforce. When we did our financial systems upgrade last year, we had to provide training on the new capabilities -- not the platform. The effort has been a great success."

Moreover, in a recent survey, prominent healthcare executives predict a drastic shift from on-premise IT infrastructure into the cloud. That includes electronic health records, clinical decision support and analytics.

LUMEDX's HealthView delivers HIPAA-compliant data management and analytics solutions via the cloud, making important data available to your providers-anywhere, anytime-while reducing the time and money you spend on IT infrastructure. To learn more about our various cloud and on-premise options, contact us at info@lumedx.com.

Electronic Health Records are essential tools for healthcare organizations. But they don't obviate the need for a Cardiovascular Information System (CVIS). In fact, changing payment models, new government mandates, and evolving care practices are making the CVIS more important than ever.

Both the clinical and operational aspects of cardiovascular services are highly complex, and they require a technology solution that can match the complexity of the services themselves. A comprehensive CVIS is specifically designed to collect and manage the vast amount of data required by cardiovascular services, and works in tandem with the EHR by:

Capturing queryable data to enable analytics and support outcomes improvements

Facilitating structured reports

Providing the level of detailed information needed to care for heart patients

Learn why cardiovascular services require dedicated information systems in our white paper, "Bridging the Gaps: A True CVIS and the EHR." This document outlines how the CVIS complements the EHR so cardiovascular services can improve efficiency, reduce costs and deliver best-quality patient care. The paper is the result of communications and observations with current LUMEDX clients, as well as with prospective clients who have completed a deep-dive comparison of our CVIS with their EHR systems.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has pushed back the implementation date for its bundled payments for cardiac care from July 1 until Oct. 1, according to Cardiovascular Business. It also suggested it could further delay the model until Jan. 1, 2018.

CMS announced the delay of the program, titled the Cardiac Rehabilitation Incentive Payment Model, this week in the Federal Register.

The bundled-payment program would allow approximately 1,120 acute care hospitals in 98 designated markets to hold on to the savings they achieve if they spend less than the target price for a 90-day episode of care for bypass and heart attack patients. However, hospitals that exceed the target price must repay Medicare -- and target prices will be determined retrospectively.

CMS previously predicted that the program - which also covers knee and hip replacement - would save the federal government as much as $159 million between now and 2021. In 2014, the CMS said, heart attack treatment for 200,000 patients cost Medicare more than $6 billion.

The new Secretary of Health & Human Services, Tom Price, has been a critic of the program, objecting to the mandatory nature of the initiative. Seema Verma, the new CMS administrator, said during her confirmation hearing in February that she preferred a gradual expansion of new payment models, Cardiovascular Business reported.

The CMS announcement said an additional three-month delay is necessary to allow time for additional review, "to ensure that the agency has adequate time to undertake notice and comment rulemaking to modify the policy if modifications are warranted, and to ensure that in such a case participants have a clear understanding of the governing rules and are not required to take needless compliance steps."

CMS added that participants would have more time to prepare for these models with the delay and that it would be preferable for payment periods to align with the calendar year. As a result, the CMS said, it is seeking comment on delaying the bundles until January 2018.

From one hospital to another, the cost of treating heart attack patients varies by as much as 50 percent. Does your hospital have a plan to meet the target prices for bypass and heart attack patients? LUMEDX's Cardiovascular Performance Program can help. Click here to find out how.

The focus for this week's healthcare IT round-up is cardiology PACS and the cardiology imaging market. Read on to see the top industry news stories we've compiled from around the Web. You can also learn more about LUMEDX'sHealthViewCardioPACS solution here.

Diagnostic and Interventional Cardiology reports that the largest barrier to hospitals seeking to upgrade their CVIS or cardiology PACS systems is interoperability. The article states that: "... an ideal CVIS should be standards-based, vendor neutral, [and] use[s] structured reporting (to enable comprehensive searches and data mining)."

GBI Research's lastest report on the global PACS market shows that the industry will surpass $5.3 billion in value by 2020. The global PACS market is currently valued at $2.9 billion, with the United States leading the charge. According to the report, "... many U.S. hospitals are considering upgrading their conventional PACS and are seeking interoperability with different vendors of EMRs and other information systems."

Diagnostic Imaging reports on a recent study published in the Journal of American College of Cardiology that shows that appropriate use criteria (AUC) for cardiac imaging have led to some improvements in volumes of cardiac imaging requests. AUC resulted in improvements for some types of cardiac imaging tests but not all.

According to a report from market research firm MicroMarket Monitor, the North American cardiology PACS market is projected to grow 5.9% from 2014 to 2019. As of 2013, the industry was valued at $206.7 million.

Diagnostic Imaging discusses how EMR vendors are beginning to make forays into the cardiology PACS market, one that was previously controlled by a "core set of image-centric vendors." According to the article, major vendors are looking to expand into the cardiology image and information systems (CIIMS) space.